http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/op...id-of-fat.html
Why Is the Federal Government Afraid of Fat?
By DARIUSH MOZAFFARIAN and DAVID S. LUDWIGJULY 9, 2015
BOSTON SINCE the publication of the federal governments 1980 Dietary
Guidelines, dietary policy has focused on reducing total fat in the
American diet specifically, to no more than 30 percent of a persons
daily calories. This fear of fat has had far-reaching impacts, from
consumer preferences to the billions of dollars spent by the military,
government-run hospitals and school districts on food. As we argue in a
recently published article in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, 35 years after that policy shift, its long past time for
us to exonerate dietary fat.
The guidelines changed how Americans eat. By the mid-1990s, a flood of
low-fat products entered the food supply: nonfat salad dressing, baked
potato chips, low-fat sweetened milk and yogurt and low-fat processed
turkey and bologna. Take fat-free SnackWells cookies. In 1994, only two
years after being introduced, SnackWells skyrocketed to become
Americas No. 1 cookie, displacing Oreos, a favorite for more than 80 years.
In place of fat, we were told to eat more carbohydrates. Indeed,
carbohydrates were positioned as the foundation of a healthy diet: The
1992 edition of the food pyramid, assembled by the Department of
Agriculture, recommended up to 11 daily servings of bread, cereal, rice
and pasta. Americans, and food companies and restaurants, listened our
consumption of fat went down and carbs, way up.
But nutrition, like any scientific field, has advanced quickly, and by
2000, the benefits of very-low-fat diets had come into question.
Increasingly, the 30 percent cap on dietary fat appeared arbitrary and
possibly harmful. Following an Institute of Medicine report, the 2005
Dietary Guidelines quietly began to reverse the governments campaign
against dietary fat, increasing the upper limit to 35 percent and
also, for the first time, recommending a lower limit of 20 percent.
Yet, this major change went largely unnoticed by federal food policy
makers. The Nutrition Facts panel on all packaged foods continued to
use, and still uses today, the older 30 percent limit on total fat. And
the Food and Drug Administration continues to regulate health claims
based on total fat, regardless of the food source. In March, the F.D.A.
formally warned the manufacturer of Kind snack bars to stop marketing
their products as healthy when they exceeded decades-old limits on
total and saturated fat even though the fats in these products mainly
come from nuts and healthy vegetable sources.
The We Can! program, run by the National Institutes of Health,
recommends that kids eat almost anytime fat-free salad dressing,
ketchup, diet soda and trimmed beef, but only eat sometimes or less
often all vegetables with added fat, nuts, peanut butter, tuna canned
in oil and olive oil. Astoundingly, the National School Lunch Program
bans whole milk, but allows sugar-sweetened skim milk.
Consumers didnt notice, either. Based on years of low-fat messaging,
most Americans still actively avoid dietary fat, while eating far too
much refined carbohydrates. This fear of fat also drives industry
formulations, with heavy marketing of fat-reduced products of dubious
health value.
Recent research has established the futility of focusing on low-fat
foods. Confirming many other observations, large randomized trials in
2006 and 2013 showed that a low-fat diet had no significant benefits for
heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer risks, while a high-fat,
Mediterranean-style diet rich in nuts or extra-virgin olive oil
exceeding 40 percent of calories in total fat significantly reduced
cardiovascular disease, diabetes and long-term weight gain. Other
studies have shown that high-fat diets are similar to, or better than,
low-fat diets for short-term weight loss, and that types of foods,
rather than fat content, relate to long-term weight gain.
This is not to say that high-fat diets are always healthy, or low-fat
diets always harmful. But rather than focusing on total fat or other
numbers on the back of the package, the emphasis should be on eating
more minimally processed fruits, nuts, vegetables, beans, fish, yogurt,
vegetable oils and whole grains in place of refined grains, white
potatoes, added sugars and processed meats. How much we eat is also
determined by what we eat: Cutting calories without improving food
quality rarely produces long-term weight loss.
Recognizing this new evidence, the scientists on the 2015 Dietary
Guidelines Advisory Committee, for the first time in 35 years have sent
recommendations to the government without any upper limit on total fat.
In addition, reduced-fat foods were specifically not recommended for
obesity prevention. Instead, the committee encouraged consumption
according to healthful food-based diet patterns.
The limit on total fat is an outdated concept, an obstacle to sensible
change that promotes harmful low-fat foods, undermines efforts to limit
refined grains and added sugars, and discourages the food industry from
developing products higher in healthy fats. Fortunately, the people
behind the Dietary Guidelines understand that. Will the government,
policy makers and the food industry take notice this time?